Aliens' action-adventure tone was in contrast to the horror motifs of the
original Alien. Following the success of The
Terminator (1984), which helped establish Cameron as a
major action director,[4] 20th
Century Fox greenlitAliens with a budget of approximately $18 million. It was
filmed in England at Pinewood Studios, and at a
decommissioned power plant.

Plot

Ellen Ripley
(Sigourney
Weaver), the only survivor of the space freighter
Nostromo, is rescued and revived after drifting for
fifty-seven years in hypersleep. At an interview before a
panel of executives from her employer, the Weyland-Yutani
Corporation, her testimony regarding the Alien is met with extreme
skepticism as no physical evidence of the creature survived the
destruction of the Nostromo. Ripley loses her space flight
license as a result of her "questionable judgment" and learns that
LV-426, the planetoid where her crew first encountered
the Alien eggs, is now home to a terraforming colony. Some time later,
Ripley is visited by Weyland-Yutani representative Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) and
Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope) of the Colonial
Marines, who inform her that contact has been lost with the colony
on LV-426. The company decides to dispatch Burke and a unit of
marines to investigate, and offers to restore Ripley's flight
status and pick up her contract if she will accompany them as a
consultant. Traumatized by her previous encounter with the Alien,
Ripley initially refuses to join, but accepts when she realizes
that the mission will allow her to face her fears, which had been
plaguing her since her first encounter. Aboard the warship
Sulaco she is introduced to the Colonial Marines,
including Sergeant Apone (Al Matthews), Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn),
Privates Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) and Hudson (Bill Paxton), and the
androidBishop (Lance
Henriksen), toward whom Ripley is initially hostile due to her
previous experience with the android Ash aboard the
Nostromo.

The heavily-armed expedition descends to the surface of LV-426
via dropship, where they find
the colony seemingly abandoned. Two living Alien facehuggers are
found in containment tanks in the medical lab, and the only
colonist found is a traumatized young girl nicknamed Newt (Carrie Henn). The
marines determine that the colonists are clustered in the
nuclear-powered atmosphere processing station. There they find a
large Alien nest filled with the cocooned colonists. The Aliens attack and kill
most of the unit, but Ripley rescues Hicks, Vasquez, and Hudson.
With Gorman knocked unconscious during the rescue, Hicks assumes
command and orders the dropship to recover the survivors, intending
to return to the Sulaco and destroy the colony from orbit.
However, a stowaway Alien kills the dropship pilots in flight,
causing the vessel to crash into the processing station;
subsequently, the surviving humans barricade themselves inside the
colony complex.

Ripley discovers that it was Burke who ordered the colonists to
investigate the derelict spaceship where the Nostromo crew
first encountered the Alien eggs, and that he hopes to return Alien
specimens to the company laboratories where he can profit from
their use as biological weapons. She threatens to expose him, but
Bishop soon informs the group of a greater threat: the damaged
processing station has become unstable due to the dropship's crash
and will soon detonate with the force of a thermonuclear weapon. He
volunteers to use the colony's transmitter to pilot the
Sulaco's remaining dropship to the surface by remote
control so that the group can escape. Ripley and Newt fall asleep
in the medical laboratory, awakening to find themselves locked in
the room with the two facehuggers, which have been released from
their tanks. Ripley is able to alert the marines, who rescue them
and kill the creatures. Ripley accuses Burke of attempting to
smuggle implanted Alien embryos past Earth's quarantine inside her
and Newt, and of planning to kill the rest of the marines in
hypersleep during the return trip. The electricity is suddenly cut
off and numerous Aliens attack through the ceiling; Hudson, Burke,
Gorman, and Vasquez are killed and Newt is captured by the
Aliens.

Ripley and an injured Hicks reach Bishop and the second
dropship, but Ripley is unwilling to leave Newt behind. She rescues
Newt from the hive in the processing station, where the two
encounter the Alien queen and her egg chamber. Ripley destroys most
of the eggs, enraging the queen, who escapes by tearing free from
her ovipositor.
Closely pursued by the queen, Ripley and Newt rendezvous with
Bishop and Hicks on the dropship and escape moments before the
colony is consumed by the nuclear blast. Back on the
Sulaco, Ripley and Bishop's relief at their narrow escape
is interrupted when the Alien queen, stowed away on the dropship's
landing gear, impales Bishop and tears him in half. Ripley battles
the queen using an exosuit cargo-loader. The two of
them tumble into a large airlock, which Ripley then opens, expelling the
queen into space. Ripley clambers to safety and she, Newt, Hicks,
and the still-functioning Bishop enter hypersleep for the return to
Earth.

Cast

Sigourney Weaver as
Ellen
Ripley, the only character who previously encountered
one of the Aliens. Ripley accompanies the Colonial Marines to
investigate LV-426. Weaver reprised her role from Alien, with
Ripley being the only surviving character from that film.

Carrie
Henn as Newt, real name
Rebecca Jorden, a child who is the only survivor
of the colony on LV-426. She forms a close bond with Ripley.

Michael
Biehn as Corporal Dwayne Hicks, a
squad leader of the investigating Colonial Marines. Hicks forms a
close bond with Ripley during the mission on LV-426.

Paul
Reiser as Carter J. Burke, a
corporate lawyer for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation who meets with
Ripley after she is awakened from cryogenic stasis. He accompanies
Ripley and the Marines to LV-426 to oversee the company's interests
in the mission.

Additional Marines were played by Tip Tipping (as Private Tim Crowe), and
Trevor Steedman (as Private Trevor Wierzbowski). They were given
hardly any dialogue or screen-time.

Production

Origins
and inspiration

While completing pre-production of The Terminator in 1983, director James Cameron
discussed the possibility of working on a sequel to Alien (1979)
with producer David Giler.[6]
A fan of the original film, Cameron was interested in crafting a
sequel and entered a self-imposed seclusion to brainstorm a concept
for Alien II.[6]
After four days Cameron produced an initial forty-five page
treatment, although management changes at 20th Century Fox resulted
in the film being put on hiatus, as they felt that Alien
had not generated enough profit to warrant a sequel.[6]
A scheduling conflict with actor Arnold Schwarzenegger caused
filming of The Terminator to be delayed by nine months (as
Schwarzenegger was filming Conan the Destroyer), allowing
Cameron additional time to write a script for Aliens.
While filming The Terminator, Cameron wrote ninety pages
for Aliens, and although the script was not finished, Fox
was impressed and told him that if The Terminator was a
success, he would be able to direct Aliens.[7]

Following the success of The Terminator, Cameron and
partner Gale Anne
Hurd were given approval to direct and produce the sequel to
Alien, scheduled for a 1986 release. Cameron was enticed
by the opportunity to create a new world and opted not to follow
the same formula as Alien, but to create a worthy combat
sequel focusing "more on terror, less on horror".[8]Sigourney
Weaver, who played Ellen Ripley in Alien, had doubts
about the project, but after meeting Cameron she expressed interest
in revisiting her character. 20th Century Fox, however, refused to
sign a contract with Weaver over a payment dispute and asked
Cameron to write a story excluding Ellen Ripley.[7]
He refused on the grounds that Fox had indicated that Weaver had
signed on when he began writing the script. With Cameron's
persistence, Fox signed the contract and Weaver obtained a salary
of $1 million, a sum equal to thirty times what she was paid for
the first film.[9]
Weaver nicknamed her role in the Alien sequel "Rambolina",
referring to John
Rambo of the Rambo series, and stated
that she approached the role as akin to the titular role in Henry V
or women warriors in Chinese classical
literature.[9]

Cameron drew inspiration for the Aliens story from the
Vietnam War, a
situation in which a technologically superior force was mired in a
hostile foreign environment: "Their training and technology are
inappropriate for the specifics, and that can be seen as analogous
to the inability of superior American firepower to conquer the
unseen enemy in Vietnam: a lot of firepower and very little wisdom,
and it didn't work."[6][10] In the
story of Aliens the Colonial Marines are hired to protect
the business interests of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, corresponding
to the belief that corporate interests were the reason that
American troops were sent to South Vietnam. The attitude of the
Marines was influenced by the Vietnam War; they are portrayed as
cocky and confident of their inevitable victory, but when they find
themselves facing a less technologically advanced but more
determined enemy, the outcome is not what they expect.[8]

Concept and
design

The AH-1 Cobra used in
Vietnam served as inspiration for the design of the dropship.

Early concept art was created by Syd Mead, who had worked on Blade Runner,
2010, and
Tron. One
of the original designs for the spaceship Sulaco was
spherical, but it was redesigned as the ship would be out of frame
due to the film's aspect ratio. Cameron showed Mead his own
concept art and the final result was described as a "rocket gun
that carries stuff". Concept artists were asked to incorporate
subliminal acknowledgments to the Vietnam War, which included
designing the dropship as
a combination of a F-4 Phantom II and AH-1 Cobra.[11]

Some scenes of the Alien nest were shot in a decommissioned power
plant in Acton,
London. The crew thought it was a perfect place to film due to
its grilled walkways and numerous corridors. Problems were
encountered with rust and asbestos, however, and the crew was required
to spend money to clean the asbestos.[11]
The Alien nest set was not dismantled after filming, and was reused
in 1989 as the Axis Chemicals set for Batman. When the crew of
Batman entered the set, they found most of it intact.[12]

The APC (armored personnel carrier) was built upon the chassis of
an aircraft tug tractor.

British
Airways was re-equipping several of its aircraft tug tractors, and the crew managed to
purchase a Douglas Equipment Limited DC12-series tug to use as the
armored
personal carrier.[13] It
initially weighed 70 short tons (64,000 kg), and although the crew removed
35 short tons (32,000 kg) of lead, the power station
floor had to be reinforced to support the weight. The crew used
many "junk" items in the set designs, such as Ripley's toilet,
which came from a Boeing
747. Lockers, helicopter engines, and vending machines were
used as set elements in the opening hypersleep scene. Production
designer Peter Lamont was asked to reduce the cost of several
scenes, including the not-yet-filmed marine hypersleep sequence.
Gale Hurd wanted to cut the scene altogether, but Lamont and
Cameron felt it was important to the sequence of the film. To save
on cost, only four hypersleep chambers were created and a mirror
was used to create the illusion that there were twelve in the
scene. Instead of using hydraulics, the chambers were opened and
closed by wires operated by puppeteers.[11]

Casting

Cameron opted to hire actors who had, or could create, American
accents. Over 3,000 residents in the United Kingdom auditioned.
After auditions of UK residents proved unsuccessful, the crew
imported actors from America including Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Michael Biehn, who had all worked with
Cameron on The Terminator. The role of Newt was the most
difficult to cast according to the casting director. The casting
team auditioned schoolchildren, but found that many of them had
acted in commercials and were accustomed to smiling after saying
their lines, a trait that the producers wished to avoid due to the
dark tone of Aliens. Carrie Henn, whose father was stationed at
a United States military base, was chosen out of 500 children for
the role of Newt,[8]
although she had no previous acting experience.[14]

Actors who played Marines were asked to read Robert A.
Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers and undergo
military training which included running, lifting weights, learning
salutes, marches, deployments, and maneuvers for two weeks. Al Matthews had
experience in the military and believed he was cast as Sergeant
Apone because of this experience. Cameron wanted the Marines to
train together, so that they would form bonds that would show
on-screen. Sigourney Weaver, William
Hope, and Paul
Reiser were absent from training due to other obligations, but
Cameron felt that this suited their characters as "outsiders" in
the film. Michael Biehn was also absent from the training, as he
was not cast until one week after filming had commenced.[14]

Filming

The producing team behind Aliens, James Cameron and Gale
Ann Hurd.

Aliens was filmed on a budget of $18 million at Pinewood
Studios, with production lasting ten months.[6]
Production was affected by a number of personnel and cast
disruptions. Shooting was said to be problematic due to cultural
clashes between Cameron and the British crew, with the crew having
what actor Bill
Paxton called a "really indentured" way of working. Cameron,
who is known to be a hard driving director and at the time was
bound to a low budget with a release date set that he could not
delay, found it difficult to adjust to working practices such as
the regular tea breaks that brought production to a temporary halt.
The crew were admirers of Ridley Scott, and many believed Cameron to
be too young and inexperienced to be directing such a film as
Aliens, despite Cameron's attempts to show them his
previous film, The Terminator, which had not yet
been released in the UK.[15]

At one point the crew members mocked Cameron's wife, producer
Gale Anne Hurd, by asking her who the producer was and insisting
that she was only getting producer's credit because she was married
to the director. A walkout occurred when Cameron clashed with an
uncooperative cameraman who refused to light a scene the way
Cameron wanted. The cameraman had lit the Alien nest set brightly,
while Cameron insisted on his original vision of a dark, foreboding
nest, relying on the lights from the Marines' armor. After the
cameraman was fired, Hurd managed to coax the crew members into
coming back to work.[15]

Weapons and
props

The M41A pulse rifle.

Weapons used by the Marines were based on real, fully functional
weapons. British armorers used guns they found to be the most
reliable when firing blanks and those which looked futuristic. The
pulse rifles were created from a Thompson SMG, with an attached
fore-end of a Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun and a Remington 12
Gauge Model 870P receiver with barrel. The smart guns carried by
Vasquez and Drake were based on the German MG-42 machine gun and were
maneuvered with steadicam harnesses created using old
motorcycle parts. The crew found flamethrowers the most difficult weapon to
create and use, as they were the heaviest and most dangerous.[16]

Music

Music composer James Horner felt he was not given enough
time to create a musical score. Horner arrived in England
and expected the film to be "locked" so he could
write the score in six weeks, which he thought was a sufficient
amount of time. Horner, however, discovered that filming and
editing were still taking place, and he was unable to view the
film. He visited the sets and editing rooms for three weeks and
found that editor Ray
Lovejoy was barely keeping up with the workload due to time
restrictions. Horner believed Cameron was preoccupied with sound
effects, citing that Cameron spent two days with the sound engineer
creating the sounds for the pulse rifles. He also complained that
he was given an outdated recording studio; the score was recorded
with the London Symphony Orchestra at
Abbey Road
Studios, a thirty-year-old studio that was barely able to patch
in synthesizers or
use the electronic equipment that Horner required.[17]

Six weeks from theatrical release, no dubbing had taken place and the
score had not been written, as Horner was unable to view the
completed film. The final cue for
the scene in which Ripley battles the Alien queen was written
overnight. Cameron completely reworked the scene, leaving Horner to
rewrite the music. As Gale Hurd did not have much music production
experience, she and Cameron denied Horner's request to push the
film back four weeks so he could finish the score. Horner felt
that, given more time, he could get the score to 100% of his
satisfaction, rather than the 80% he estimated he had been able to
achieve. The score was recorded in roughly four days.[17]
Despite his troubles, Horner received an Academy Award nomination
(his first) for Best Original Score.

Horner stated that tensions between himself and Cameron were so
high during post-production that he assumed they would never work
together again. Horner believed that Cameron's film schedules were
too short and stressful. The two parted ways until 1997 when
Cameron, so impressed with Horner's score for Braveheart, asked
him to compose the score for Titanic.[17]

Visual
effects

Brothers Robert and Dennis Skotak were hired to supervise the
visual effects, having previously worked with Cameron on several Roger Corman movies.
Two stages were used to construct the colony on LV-426, using
miniature models that were on average six feet tall and three feet
wide.[18]
Filming the miniatures was difficult due to the weather; the wind
would blow over the props, although it proved helpful to give the
effect of weather on the planet. Cameron used these miniatures and
several effects to make scenes look larger than they really were,
including rear projection, mirrors, beam splitters, camera splits
and foreground miniatures.[18]

The Alien suits were made more flexible and durable than the
ones used in Alien, to expand on the
creatures' movements and allow them to crawl and jump. Dancers,
gymnasts and stunt men were hired to portray the Aliens. The
creature's head was changed from the sleek shape used in
Alien, as the crew thought that the original shape would
crack with the creatures' increased mobility. Ridges were added
along the head to increase its durability during movements.[18]

Scenes involving the Alien queen were the most
difficult to film, according to production staff. A life-sized mock-up was
created by Stan
Winston's company in the United States to see how it would
operate. Once the testing was complete, the crew working on the
queen flew to England and began work creating the final version.
Standing at fourteen feet, it was operated using a mixture of
puppeteers, control rods, hydraulics, cables, and a crane above to
support it. Two puppeteers were inside the suit operating its arms,
and sixteen were required to move it. All sequences involving the
queen were filmed in-camera with no post-production
manipulation.[18]

Reception

Box
office

Eagerly anticipated by fans following the success of Alien,[19]Aliens was released in America on July 18, 1986, and
September 26 in the United Kingdom. The film opened in 1,437
theaters with an average opening gross of $6,995 and a weekend
gross of $10,052,042. It was number one at the United States box
office for four consecutive weeks, grossing $85.1 million, and
remains the highest-grossing Alien film at the U.S. box
office when not adjusting for inflation. The film took a further
$45.9 million outside of North America, for a total gross of $131
million.[1]

Reviews

Test and pre-screenings were unable to take place for
Aliens due to the film not being completed until its week
of release.[20]
Once it was released in cinemas, critical and audience reaction was
very positive. Critic Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5 stars out of
4 and called it "painfully and unremittingly intense" and a "superb
example of filmmaking craft." He also stated "when I walked out of
the theater, there were knots in my stomach from the film's
roller-coaster ride of violence."[21]
Walter Goodman of The New York Times said it was
a "flaming, flashing, crashing, crackling blow-'em-up show that
keeps you popping from your seat despite your better instincts and
the basically conventional scare tactics."[22]Time Magazine featured the film on the
cover of its July 28, 1986 issue, calling it the "summer's scariest
movie". Time reviewer Richard Schickel declared the film
"a sequel that exceeds its predecessor in the reach of its appeal
while giving [Sigourney] Weaver new emotional dimensions to
explore."[6]
The selection of Aliens for a Time cover was
attributed to the successful reception of the film,[23][24] as
well as its novel example of a science fiction action heroine.[25]
Echoing Time's assessment, Dave Kehr of The Chicago Reader called the film
"one sequel that surpasses the original."[26]

Reviews of the film have remained mostly positive over the
years. In a 1997 interview, Weaver stated that Aliens
"made the first Alien look like a cucumber sandwich."[27]
In a 2000 review, film critic James Berardinelli said "When it
comes to the logical marriage of action, adventure, and science
fiction, few films are as effective or accomplished as
Aliens."[28]Austin Chronicle contributor Marjorie
Baumgarten labeled the film in 2002 as "a non-stop action
fest."[29]
Based on 43 reviews, the film has a "fresh" rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes
with an average critic score of 8.8 out of 10.[30]

Awards and
accolades

Sigourney Weaver's Academy Award nomination for Best Actress
was considered a milestone at the time when the Academy gave little
recognition to the science fiction genre.

Aliens was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Music, Best
Sound, Best Film Editing, and Best Art Direction/Set Decoration. It
won two awards for Sound
Effects Editing and Visual
Effects. Sigourney Weaver received her first Academy Award
nomination for Best Actress, and
although she did not win, it was considered a landmark nomination
for an actress to be considered for a science fiction/horror film,
a genre which was given little recognition by the Academy in
1986.[8][20][31]

Aliens received four BAFTA award nominations and won in the
category of Visual Effects.[32]
It won eight Saturn Awards in the categories of Best
science fiction film, Best actress (Sigourney Weaver), Best
supporting actor (Bill
Paxton), Best supporting actress (Jenette Goldstein), Best performance
by a younger actor (Carrie Henn), Best direction (James
Cameron), Best writing (James Cameron), and Best special effects
(Stan Winston and
the L.A. Effects Group).[33]

Time
Magazine named Aliens in their Best of '86 list
calling it a "technically awesome blend of the horror, sci-fi and
service- comedy genres."[34]
In 2007, Entertainment Weekly named
Aliens as the second-best action movie of all time, behind
Die Hard.[2]
In a Rotten
Tomatoes analysis of the top 100 science fiction films,
Aliens ranks tenth among the best-reviewed films of the
genre.[3]
In 2004, Aliens was ranked thirty-fifth on Bravo's
"100 Scariest Movie Moments" for the scene in which Ripley and Newt
are attacked by facehuggers; the original Alien was ranked
second for the chestburster scene.[35
]IGN ranked it
third in its "Top 25 Action Films of All-Time", stating that "there
won't be an Alien movie as scary – or exciting – as this
one made ever again."[36
]

Special
edition

A "Special Edition" of Aliens was released in 1992 on
laserdisc and VHS that restored seventeen minutes of
deleted footage. These additions include a segment showing Newt's
family first encountering the derelict spacecraft on LV-426, Ripley
learning that her daughter died during the years she was in
hypersleep, a scene in the operations building in which the Marines
use sentry guns
against the Aliens, and several extended dialogue scenes between
Ripley and the Marines.[8]
These scenes had been deleted from the original theatrical release
as 20th Century Fox representatives thought the film was showing
"too much nothing" and spent an unnecessary amount of time building
suspense.[8]

Most of the Special Edition's footage was first seen when the
film made its broadcast television debut on CBS in 1989, but two
additional sequences concerning Burke's transmission to the colony
about the derelict, and the Jorden family's subsequent discovery of
the same, were added to the initial Laserdisc release. According to
Cameron, the visual effects for the scene were incomplete, so he
went back to the Skotak brothers and had them finish the sequences.
All currently available versions of the Special Edition contain
these scenes.

The special edition was released as part of The Alien LegacyDVD box set in 1999 along with Alien and Alien 3. Both the
theatrical version and the special edition were released again in
2003 as part of the Alien
Quadrilogy DVD box set along with similar versions of
Alien, Alien 3, and Alien
Resurrection. A separate two-disc "Special Collector's
Edition" DVD of Aliens was released on January 6, 2004
containing the same material as the two Aliens discs in
the Quadrilogy set.
[37] Additional content in these
versions included an audio commentary for the special
edition featuring director James Cameron, producer Gale Hurd,
special effects artists and crew members. The second disc included
special features relating to pre-production, production, and
post-production.
[38]

Interpretation and
analysis

Philosopher Stephen Mulhall has remarked that the
four Alien films represent an artistic rendering of the
difficulties faced by the woman's "voice" to have itself heard in a
masculinist society, as Ripley continually encounters males who try
to silence her and to force her to submit to their desires. Mulhall
sees this depicted in several events in Aliens,
particularly the inquest scene in which Ripley's explanation for
the deaths and destruction of the Nostromo, as well as her
attempts to warn the board members of the Alien danger, are met
with officious disdain. However, Mulhall believes that Ripley's
relationship with Hicks illustrates that Aliens "is
devoted ... to the possibility of modes of masculinity that seek
not to stifle but rather to accommodate the female voice, and modes
of femininity that can acknowledge and incorporate something more
or other of masculinity than our worst nightmares of it."[39]

Several movie academics, including Barbara Creed, have remarked on the color
and lighting symbolism in the Alien franchise, which offsets white,
strongly lit environments (spaceships, corporate offices) against
darker, dirtier, 'corrupted' settings (derelict alien ship,
abandoned industrial facilities). These black touches contrast or
even attempt to take over the purity of the white elements.[40]
Others, such as Kile M. Ortigo of Emory University, agree with this
interpretation and point to the Sulaco with its
"sterilized, white interior" as representing this element in the
second film of the franchise.[41]

Academics analyzing the role of the Ripley character remark on
the symbolism of the Sulaco's cryo chamber. Ripley is compared with an incorruptCatholic saint preserved in a glass
coffin (akin to Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, both
in her lying in state in the cryotube as well as her incorrupt
body, which has twice survived being almost "impregnated" by
the Alien). Accompanied by the Agnus Dei of the Ordinary Mass playing in the background of
the opening scene, these scholars argue that the Sulaco is
transformed "into a holy site where the iconic bodies of a
fetishistic religion lie in state," setting the scene for a lone
facehugger attacking its victim (corrupting it) and also causing
the emergency system to eject the cryotubes into space and to
plunge to Fiorina "Fury" 161 (representing the Fall of Man).[42]

While some claim that the shape of the Sulaco was based on a
submarine,[43] the
design has most often been described as a 'gun in space' resembling
the rifles used in the movie.[44]
Author Roz Kaveney called the opening shot of the ship traveling
through space 'fetishistic' and 'shark-like', "an image of brutal
strength and ingenious efficiency"—while the militarized interior
of the Sulaco (designed by Ron Cobb) is contrasted to the organic
interior of the Nostromo in the first movie (also designed
by Cobb).[45] David
McIntree noted the homage the
scene pays to the opening tour through the Nostromo in
Alien.[46]

The android character Bishop has been the subject of literary and
philosophical analysis as a high-profile fictional android
conforming to science fiction author Isaac Asimov's Three
Laws of Robotics and as a model of a compliant, potentially
self-aware machine.[47] His
portrayal has been studied by writers for the University of Texas Press for
its implications relating to how humans deal with the presence of
an "Other,"[48] as
Ripley treats them with fear and suspicion and a form of "hi-tech
racism and android apartheid" is present throughout the series.[49] This
is seen as part of a larger trend of technophobia in films prior to the 1990s,
with Bishop's role being particularly significant as he proves his
worth at the end of the film, thus confounding Ripley's
expectations.[50]